Expert says he's found bigger Ohio serpent mound

MARIEMONT, Ohio (AP) – An anthropologist believes he's discovered a snaking prehistoric earthwork near Cincinnati more substantial than the celebrated and nearly quarter-mile-long Serpent Mound in southern Ohio believed to be the largest of its kind in the U.S.

“This Mariemont serpent mound is much better preserved than the one in Adams County, which was largely reconstructed,” Ken Tankersley told The Cincinnati Enquirer (http://bit.ly/r3VOBn). “The fact that this much of the Mariemont earthwork survives is miraculous.”

The mound is part of an 1879 find by a physician and amateur archaeologist named Dr. Charles Metz, who identified remnants of a Native American village that had once existed in part of what is now Mariemont. Metz's discovery is on the National Register of Historic Places as the Mariemont Embankment And Village Site.

But Tankersley, a University of Cincinnati anthropology professor, said Metz didn't realize the mound was a serpent effigy 2,952 feet long, more than double the size of the one in Adams County.

Tankersley said he discovered the serpent shape in 2007 while surveying the mound using satellite imagery and tracking and a geographical information system. It was his wife, Ruth, who noticed the form and asked him about it while looking at a satellite image.

“It's a snake!” he recalled shouting out.

But some Ohio archaeologists aren't convinced.

“It looks to be an embankment, more or less, that follows the hill and then ends in an unusual, blobby enclosure,” said Bradley Lepper, an archaeologist with the Ohio Historical Society, which has said the Adams County mound is the largest serpent effigy in the U.S.

“I don't see anything particularly serpentine about it.”

Tankersley's discovery is “probably a prehistoric wall,” Lepper told The Columbus Dispatch (http://bit.ly/p2ewlR), while saying that the Serpent Mound is easily recognizable as a serpent.

Robert Genheimer, an archaeologist with the Cincinnati Museum Center, said that the Mariemont mound appears to function for controlling water. Because of development and other factors, it's difficult to tell what the earthwork's shape was supposed to be, he said.

Tankersley, who published a paper on his findings in 2008 and more recently has been briefing community leaders, dismisses the doubters.

“Regardless of the subject, you will always be able to find an opposing side,” he told the Dispatch in an email.